'You're the Worst' showrunner talks sex, mental health, and morality on his rom-com TV series

Gretchen and Jimmy are the worst in Stephen Falk's FX show, "You're the Worst." FX Networks

Stephen Falk had just moved across the country to produce a network tv show. This was his dream. Then he got a call.

"It doesn't happen, shows don't get their plugs pulled before they air, which, driving 2,000 miles at that point, I was stewing about," Falk said. "Like, this probably doesn't look good for me, I may never work again. So I thought, 'Well, maybe I should just talk about it, both for therapy and for career management.'"

He wrote about the experience in a Tumblr post that went viral. And despite his fears, he did work again. After a stint writing on Netflix's "Orange Is the New Black," he created "You're The Worst" for the FX network. It's a romantic comedy of sorts, starring two very flawed people who hook up and inevitably fall in love.

A showrunner does a lot of things: from directing to writing to making sure there's food on set. The showrunner ultimately controls every facet of a TV show, which is why we created " Showrunners," the podcast that talks to the people making the shows we love.

On this episode of "Showrunners," INSIDER's Editor-in-Chief Nicholas Carlson speaks with Falk about how he rebounded from having his show canceled and how he handles sex, mental health, morality, and more on "You're the Worst."

You can listen to the whole episode here:

Here's the full transcript of the interview:

Nicholas Carlson: Alright well thanks for joining us on Showrunners. Very nice to have you Stephen Falk.

Stephen Falk: Thank you nice to be here in my own office.

Carlson: Tell us the story through season three and go.

Falk: "You're the Worst" is a story of two sort of narcissistic, slightly alcoholic, self-involved, self-destructive people who meet. Neither of them believe in love and yet they fall for each other and because they are so well matched and don't judge bad behavior in each other because they put it all out on the table beforehand, they try to make a go of it and they resist old fashioned mushy love and they're successful, moderately, but not for long.

So the show really follows them, it's really just a good old fashioned rom-com but sort of told through the lens of someone who watched a lot of cable shows and a lot of British sitcoms where bad behavior is not something that has to then come with moralizing or a lesson and I was always jealous of that, doing TV in America where a likability factor was always important.

The infamous Tumblr post

Stephen Falk posted a rant on Tumblr that went viral. AP Images

Carlson: Let's talk about you. I want to know about your career, but I kind of want to like start with this one moment where you put a blog post on Tumblr that lots of people read about a show that got canceled and just tell us like about that blog post.

Falk: I had been writing movies that never got made and selling television pilots that never got made for a long time and I had a nice, completely anonymous, unsuccessful, successful career and I worked on Weeds for four years after that because I thought I should have some practical experience and by the end of my tenure on Weeds, I sold a show to NBC, we shot the pilot while I was still writing on Weeds, it got picked up to series with giant quotes around it. The most minimal commitment a network can make, which is a mid-season six episodes, but it's something. It's like the ugliest boy in school inviting you to prom, like you're still going to prom.

Carlson: So a network put your show on the air.

Falk: But the catch was we had to move to New York to do it because of tax credits so we moved to New York and the actors moved to New York and I hired a writing staff and we shot four episodes and I got a call one Friday night while I was in the middle of editing and LA said, "yeah we're pulling the plug on your show. We're just never going to put it on the air, we're never going to make this." Still don't know why, I have theories. I'm the first to admit maybe they were just getting footage and just thought it sucked, absolutely possible. I think there are probably other things that went into it and it didn't actually suck so I don't know but anyway.

And yeah I just called the cast and crew and said, "the show's over, sorry Jeffrey Tambor, sorry you moved out to New York, you can go back to Palisades." I rented a truck, drove out with the dog and somewhere around Arizona, this is driving from New York to LA, I decided I should probably - I had just been sort of silent on social media about the whole thing but it was on the front page of Hollywood Reporter. It doesn't happen, shows don't get their plugs pulled before they air, which, driving 2,000 miles at that point, I was stewing about. Like, this probably doesn't look good for me, I may never work again.

So I thought, "well, maybe I should just talk about it, both for therapy and for career management," and so I just wrote a Tumblr post about it in a really shitty motel in Arizona somewhere. I think I had Taco Bell and a bottle of whiskey, and I posted it and immediately pulled it. I had been writing on the Internet long enough to know that things that you write at two in the morning when you're drunk, you may want to like look at them with fresh eyes in the morning. So that's what I did.

A couple people saw it and emailed me immediately and then I was in a Starbucks parking lot editing it with the dog and all my bags and then I uploaded it from their WiFi and then drove to LA. Anyway, fast forward to four days later, I was in LA when I started getting like Google alerts for my name from first just the trade papers like Hollywood Reporter and Variety but then HuffPo and Slate and it was spreading. I was very measured, I wasn't blaming anyone, I just said here's what happens when you work this hard on something and it literally goes away in one phone call.

Carlson: And you framed it as advice to a young writer.

Falk: Advice to a young writer, yeah, that was my clever way of couching a too much information post in some format that didn't seem quite as thirsty.

Carlson: So what happened from there? You know, people who saw that may wonder.

Falk: What was instructive about that was I realized, and I think NBC certainly realized - or I was one more piece of evidence that made them realize - that they don't own the PR mechanism anymore. I was able to have equal voice and if not more, for zero dollars. I think Tumblr is free, right? And so I thought that was incredibly instructive and there was a Hollywood Reporter article then called, "When Showrunners Attack," and it was about me, Dan Harmon and I think Ryan Murphy. Like, how do you deal with these unhinged showrunners who can just spout off on twitter and get in fights or tell the truth, as I did, which was my big sin.

But from there, I did nothing, made furniture at my house and tried to write a screenplay that never went anywhere, and then my old boss, Jenji Kohan, she said, "I just sold a women in prison show to Netflix would you want to come work on it?" I was like, "that sounds dumb but ok." And then as I was starting to write the second season with her and her team, the first season aired and it was wildly, wildly successful and so I did that and then in the middle of that, sold this pilot to FX and had to once again leave her, so I think she'll never hire me again.

Making "You're the Worst"

Falk with the cast of FX's "You're the Worst." AP Images

Carlson: So how did your show happen? So you write a Tumblr post somewhere in Arizona and then what's the story from there?

Falk: Yeah so I was on "Orange is the New Black" and I had gone from being a showrunner and literally I fell asleep on my feet once in the writers room on the New York show, it was that overwhelming a job, to where I was just on staff for a showrunner who liked to come in at 10 and leave at 3. If you can get over the ego part of it, the sheer relief of just being a cog after being the boss is heroine-esque. It is amazing.

So I was doing that and I started a writers group in my house once a week because I missed running a writers room, so I wanted to have the experience but with wine, and so I had like ten writers that were all working, that all had careers in the industry, and we would get together every week at my house, and so coming down the pike was this FX pitch that I foolishly set because I wasn't creative at the time and I wasn't pitching anything.

Usually when you come up with a pitch, you tell your agent, you go over it with them, they're like, "ok cool," and they set up meetings at the networks and Amazon and Netflix and Hulu and you make the rounds and see if anyone's interested. I wasn't doing that, I had no interest in doing that, I was just still licking my wounds and being a cog and running this writer's group. And so in the writer's group, I said, "oh, I've got to do this pitch," and I kind of came up with this idea very spur of the moment, it was on my list of ideas but just as, "do a boozy, British-y, cable-y version of Mad About You." And I pitched it out and they bought it as I was driving home, which is not quite selling it in the room, but it was like 20 minutes later.

So it's close and the idea really in my mind, or at least my mindset at the time, which was instructive, is that I didn't give a shit if they bought it. I didn't give a shit if they made it. I didn't give a shit if it got on the air. I just wanted to not repeat the experience of bending over, perfuming myself, making myself as presentable - I'm not going to continue with the metaphor, but contorting myself artistically to try to please a network that ultimately didn't know what they wanted so they were unplease-able, you know? And in doing so, contorting your creation beyond recognizability.

I'd made this show that I really liked and it ended up being this thing that I didn't recognize anymore and didn't like and wasn't pleasing anyone and certainly wasn't pleasing myself, so I just said, "well ok, if I just pleased myself, then I won't go through any of that." The danger there is you may not be pleasing anyone. You may not be invited to the prom, but at least you won't, you know, be there with someone you're embarrassed of, wearing a dress that you don't want to be seen in. And the lesson there being, obviously, that sometimes if you just please yourself and you have honed a strong artistic voice, other people might like it.

Finding inspiration in the writer's room

Carlson: I noticed in this last season, there's a scene Killian says to Jimmy, "you never say thank you" and Jimmy turns around and for me, it's a famous line from -

Falk: Mad Men.

Carlson: "That's what the money's for."

Falk: "That's what the money's for."

Carlson: I love that line.

Falk: Well I didn't write it, Matt Weiner wrote it, or one of his writers wrote it. That line is sort of meta within meta because, you know, it's an apocryphal story perhaps but the notion out there in the ether, and I hope Matt doesn't get mad for me saying this, but that episode was kind of like Don Draper telling her, "I can't be coddling you all the time, I can't be praising all your work," was kind of Matt telling his writing staff. I don't know if that's true or not, so --

Carlson: That's great, I didn't even know that.

Falk: Then it's us taking that and I don't disagree.

Carlson: It's a YouTube clip that has been shared around my office, as well. Just because, you know, it's just such a good line. Anyways, do you see Mad Men and think, like, "just a great show," like all of us thought? Or do you feel like there's anything that came out of seeing that that is has informed your career?

Falk: Oh god, I mean shows like Breaking Bad, as we mentioned before, probably influenced my show more than most comedies or than a lot of comedies, in that there's something about the over arching novelistic storytelling in those shows that became a goal for me and my writing staff. When we write the show, and it's just a dumb little basic cable, 13 episode show, but we do spend a lot of time writing. We spend about six months just writing, which is long for a show. Generally, after 14 weeks or something, production will start and you'll be sort of overlapping.

We do all the writing first and then we do pre-production and then we shoot and then I edit. I'm there for all of it. It makes for a really long year for me, but for me, it's the only way I know how to do it. But we spend a lot of time on the writing process really looking at the whole season as a holistic piece: what is the first act of the season, what is the second act, what is the third act, what is the theme of this season, what are the character arcs of this season? We look at it in this sort of big macro way and then we start sort of filling in the gaps.

I'm always saying, "well, what's the story?" Like, we can't just introduce something and not have it play out. We try to make everything, even props sometimes, have a beginning, middle, and the end. When you start to watch a show like that, you begin to feel that you're in good hands. You begin to relax and you begin to trust then that the narrators of the show, the storytellers, know where they're going.

Carlson: Tell me what the showrunner blues are.

Falk: Showrunner blues are the parts of the job or the time in the job where the different facets which could all be full time jobs and probably should be - writing, being on set, editing, in my case directing, and then just general producorial stuff - all these full time jobs are all requiring your time and all have strict deadlines and clocks ticking louder and louder at the same time.

Carlson: This is the result of, partly, you know, there's not three networks anymore and so if you get a show, you get all of the huge staff but now there's all these networks and probably budgets are lower, opportunities -

Falk: Yeah and it's all compounded by my failings as a showrunner to delegate properly, but I'm getting better, I promise.

Writing morally ambiguous characters

Gretchen and Jimmy woke up after a night of drinking and smoking cocaine to find they had stolen a DVD rental box. FX Networks

Carlson: Let's talk about the show. You know, there's a scene in the most recent season where Jimmy's got some box, he brings it in from outside, it turns out to be his father's ashes, but you don't know that from this scene.

Falk: Sounds like a hilarious show.

Carlson: People keep bringing the box in and he keeps throwing it out, Gretchen sees him throw the box out the front door and she's like, "oh we can litter now?" And she just chucks the garbage out the front door and then later in the episode, a nice callback, there's more stuff out there and so, littering is terrible, right? Where is the line in ethics and morals for the characters? Because they're still likable at the end, but what is their compass? What are the rules for you guys when you're writing it and when you think about what bad things do they do, what don't they do? Or maybe I'm thinking about it too simplistic.

Falk: I think our rules, or our compass is guided by what is believable human behavior for the characters we've created, which are a bit extreme, within the world we've created, which is a bit extreme. So in other words, is this something this character might do? Might this character litter? Sure. Might this character drive drunk? Yeah, that character might drive drunk. Might that character cuckold her husband?

Yeah, if she heard that cuckolding was a thing and could convince him to let her screw other dudes while he watched and was desperate enough to keep the marriage that he would go along with it. I remember getting in a fight way long ago in my career with a girlfriend way long ago in my romantic career who read something I had written, I think it was a script, and the character drove drunk and she was outraged, "you can't advocate driving drunk," and I literally didn't understand her point. This character would do that, so they're doing it. If I was Shakespeare, and they all stab Julius Caesar, I'm not advocating stabbing.

Carlson: Yeah you're not Iago or whatever.

Falk: I mean, we have an alt-right character this season.

Carlson: Oh boy.

Falk: Yeah, timely, but we started this back in January. Are we saying alt-right is something that should be looked favorably upon? No. Are we condemning it or purely making fun of this character? Probably, but more importantly, is it believable that this character would be taken up by quote-unquote men's rights activists, which are next door to alt-right, given his circumstances and given the world of the show? Yes.

Carlson: A lot of the characters in this show are kind of a little bit on the edge of terrible.

Falk: Yeah, like drinking white wine when you're pregnant.

Carlson: I mean, they're the worst, right? Drinking white wine, every time I see that I'm like, "what are you doing?"

Falk: Yes, and you should. There should be a certain amount of outrage but you know, this sort of Billy Joel axiom, "I'd rather laugh with the sinner than die with the saints," I mean, the sinners have much more fun. The villains are the ones you want to watch and I don't think of our characters as villain-esque -

Carlson: From Shakespeare to Billy Joel.

Falk: - at all but yeah, do you want to watch Tony Soprano or Al Swearengen? Rather, do you want to watch Michael Landon in Highway to Heaven? I don't know.

Carlson: We had Alec Berg on last season of this podcast and he talked about one of the big things that he learned from Larry David is like no hugging, no morals, and he kind of was excited about the innovation beyond the morality play that stories had been.

Falk: Yeah and at the same time, I don't view our show like that. There's a lot of hugging and there are a lot of lessons and episodes come to a neat end. The difference, I think, is we tend to then keep filming. So in other words, The Graduate ending sort of is a touchstone for us, like that movie should have ended when they run out of the church and get on a bus, but instead they keep rolling and it may be apocryphal that that was just the actors not knowing what to do after the take ended, but they kept rolling.

They get on the bus and they're relieved and she ran out on what was going to be a horrible marriage and he got the girl and they're on the bus and they're excited and they look at each other and they smile and then they slowly look away and their smiles die because smiles do because smiles are hard to maintain. And then the long "what if" after this, or what happens next? And what are the boring meals that we have that we don't have anything to say to each other anymore? That's all there in like 20 seconds of footage and that's what our show likes to explore beyond the tidy endings that we do have. We do have the hugs.

Carlson: Another theme of this show, which is, I guess one phrase you could use is sex positive. I mean, these characters like to have sex, they're not very shy about it. They're giving hand jobs in the back seat of the car while a friend drives, I should say.

Falk: You know, I'm from Berkeley, there's a little lefty moralizing and a little social justice warriorism in everything I do, I think. Part of that, I mean like, I'm raising a daughter. I don't want my daughter to ever watch this show but I want to be not part of the solution but at least not part of the problem in that my female characters have appetites and they eat and they drink and they are not subservient to men and they pass the Bechdel test and they have storylines and they are equal because I think women are frankly slightly more interesting than men.

Carlson: How much in your experience in your career do people think about that kind of stuff? I mean, the Bechdel is something that comes up on this show a lot. Sometimes I give a showrunner a hard time if it hasn't happened. Do people think about those kinds of things or do they kind of laugh at it or they just hope they pass it?

Falk: I think people do. I think those things matter. FX, for example - not to be a homer, but I do love my network - there was a report card a couple years ago about minority and female director representation and they released scorecards by network and FX did not do so well. That was very troubling to the people at the top and so, to their credit, I think not in a PR way necessarily, although, you know, they're business people, but out of a true desire to help what was then shown to them as a problem, they made it a goal to have 50 percent minority and female directors the next season and they did.

Scripting mental health

Gretchen hides in a corner behind Jimmy at her therapy session. FX Networks

Carlson: So there's a lot of mental illness in this show.

Falk: You mean in the writing room or -

Carlson: You tell me. Gretchen is this interesting - let's talk about her reaction to therapy. She just hates her therapist and then stalks her therapist.

Falk: Yeah, well I think hate is a strong word. In the writers room you think, "ok, Gretchen is going to be in therapy. What is the best version of that? What might her attitude be?" We talk about that and she may be defensive and combative. What's the best version of being defensive and combative? Well not literally fighting, that would not be believable that she would be retained as a client, but ok, well she can, instead of sitting in the chair, she could sit in the corner and eat pistachios and play on her phone, rather than doing it and also then bring Jimmy in because she knows he'll talk the whole time and she won't have to and then she can say she did it.

That, obviously, then doesn't last and then she immediately overcompensates and completely develops this mom replacement relationship where she even asks, can I call you mom? And she stalks her and confronts her and butts into her life and tells her that her boyfriend sucks and just wants this woman's approval then. We just tried to write what would be a believable storyline for someone who doesn't want to be in therapy but also she starts to, in the most rudimentary way, put together the bare bones of human psychology. Like she literally with wide eyed wonder says, "wait, you mean things that happened to me as a child affects how I behave now?"

She never put that together and the whole reason she's doing this is for her relationship and for her boyfriend and so that's not a great way to go into therapy. Agreeing to be medicated is probably good for her in a vacuum, but it's our way of showing begrudging character growth, like she's actually making a sacrifice for a relationship and, for someone like Gretchen, that's a giant step.

Re-imagining romantic comedies

Carlson: Romantic comedies, I think I saw a story, I can't even remember where now but the film industry has stopped making them and this is a rom-com, I mean what do you just think about the future of rom-coms?

Falk: You know, one can be tempted to say everything's cyclical, romantic comedy is just going through a down period from you know, "Annie Hall" through "When Harry Met Sally" and the Hugh Grant-y, Louis Armstrong scored rom-coms through the sort of -

Carlson: To the derivatives.

Falk: - kind of pale imitations with Reese Witherspoon and Katherine Heigl and then it died and that was the death knell, or at least that's the 30 year cycle. Have rom-coms come and gone? Well, I think musicals and westerns are a tiny bit narrower in terms of their relationship to the human experience and romance, the quest for love, the game of it, that probably is a little closer to human experience and probably a little more evergreen.

Carlson: It's a good character desire.

Falk: It is. And it's not going to go away, I think they just need to be reinvented, and so while this was just a show on my list and something I wanted to do as a tonic for my past experience, coming out of being a big fan of rom-coms, watching that 30 year cycle, and wondering what's next for them and thinking that I could do it better and do something new with it at least. We didn't usher in this great golden age, but certainly, I'm very realistic about the modesty of our influence and reach, but I do think that by pure timing or actual influence or both, there has been a slight, small little resurgence of rom-coms that try to treat young romance in a slightly more believable way and I think that's a good thing.

Carlson: Well listen, this has been great. I'm really glad you made some time to have this conversation, thank you.